SCOS Co-Director Jim Ambuske recently appeared on the new podcast, Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant. Hosted by Kathryn Gehred, a historian of women and a research editor at the Martha Washington Papers Project at the University of Virginia, the show explores women and the letters they wrote in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Ambuske joined Gehred to talk about the life of Flora MacDonald, who is perhaps best known for her role in concealing Charles Edward Stuart, the famed Bonnie Prince Charlie, following the Battle of Culloden in 1746 during the final Jacobite Uprising. MacDonald features prominently in Ambuske's current book project, which tells the story of emigration from Scotland to America in the era of the American Revolution. In 1772, MacDonald wrote a letter to John Mackenzie of Delvine, a Writer to the Signet, describing the social and economic conditions on her home isle of Skye and her belief that her own emigration to the American colonies was imminent.
In the episode, "Begin The World Again A Newe," Ambuske and Gehred talk about the dramatic changes in Scotland and the British Empire that inspired many Scots to emigrate to North America in this period, and why other Scots perceived it as a threat to order and society. They also touch on SCOS and what we can learn about eighteenth-century life in the Atlantic World by digging into Session Papers.
Listen to the episode, read a transcript of MacDonald's letter, and hear other historians discuss their favorite letters at Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant.
